Now you see me, now you don't: Unveiling adolescent multilingual identities through magic, storytelling, and translanguaging

Abstract

Identity development at school is inextricably linked with both language practice and positive and/or negative school experiences. Understanding “identification as an ongoing social and political process” (Bucholtz & Hall, 2004, p. 376), educators must be purposeful in constructing educational possibilities that address identity. The goals of this paper are to propose and describe potential school-based activities and opportunities that bridge adolescent active bilingual learners/users of English (ABLE, Przymus et al., 2020) students’ interests, multilingualism, and identities in schools. Building off of previous work with interest-based communities of practice (Przymus, 2016; Przymus et al., 2020; Canagarajah, 2007; Norton, 2013) and work in oracy/literacy studies that combine translanguaging in adolescent storytelling with magic (Przymus & Faggella-Luby, 2023), in this paper we share the process and results of both finished and ongoing studies with adolescent, newcomer ABLE students in the U.S. and ABLE students in México, who are members of their schools’ and/or communities’ magic clubs.